The Uncommon Reader (8 page)

She picked up her notebook from the desk and dropped it on the floor. Sir Claude woke up nodding and smiling as if appreciating something the Queen had just said.

‘How are your memoirs?’ said the Queen. Sir Claude’s memoirs had been on the go for so long they had become a joke in the household. ‘How far have you got?’

‘Oh, they’re not consecutive, ma’am. One does a little every day.’

He didn’t, of course, and it was really only to forestall yet another probing royal question that he now said what he did. ‘Has Your Majesty ever considered writing?’

‘No,’ said the Queen, though this was a lie. ‘Where would one find the time?’

‘Ma’am has found time for reading.’

This was a rebuke and the Queen did not take kindly to rebukes, but for the moment she overlooked it.

‘What should one write?’

‘Your Majesty has had an interesting life.’

‘Yes,’ said the Queen. ‘One has.’

The truth was Sir Claude had no notion of what the Queen should write or whether she should write at all, and he had only suggested writing in order to get her off reading and because in his experience writing seldom got done. It was a cul-de-sac. He had been writing his memoirs for twenty years and hadn’t even written fifty pages.

‘Yes,’ he said firmly. ‘Ma’am must write. But can I give Your Majesty a tip? Don’t start at the beginning. That’s the mistake I made. Start off in the middle. Chronology is a great deterrent.’

‘Was there anything else, Sir Claude?’

The Queen gave her wide smile. The interview was over. How the Queen conveyed this information had always been a mystery to Sir Claude, but it was as plain as if a bell had rung. He struggled to his feet as the equerry opened the door, bowed his head, then when he reached the door turned and bowed his head again, then slowly stumped down the corridor on his two sticks, one of them a present from the Queen Mother.

Back in the room the Queen opened the window wider and let the breeze blow in from the garden. The equerry returned, and raising her eyebrows the Queen indicated the chair on which Sir Claude had been sitting, now with a damp patch staining the satin. Silently the young man bore the chair away, while the Queen gathered up her book and her cardigan preparatory to going into the garden.

By the time the equerry returned with another chair she had stepped out onto the terrace. He put it down and with the skill of long practice quickly set the room to rights, spotting as he did so the Queen’s notebook lying on the floor. He picked it up and before replacing it on the desk stood for a moment wondering in the Queen’s absence if he might take a peep at the contents. Except at that moment Her Majesty reappeared in the doorway.

‘Thank you, Gerald,’ she said and held out her hand.

He gave her the book and she went out.

‘Shit,’ said Gerald. ‘Shit. Shit. Shit.’

This note of self-reproach was not inappropriate as within days Gerald was no longer in attendance on Her Majesty and indeed no longer in the household at all, but back with his scarcely remembered regiment yomping in the rain over the moors of Northumberland. The speed and ruthlessness of his almost Tudor dispatch sent, as Sir Kevin would have put it, the right message and at least put paid to any further rumours of senile decay. Her Majesty was herself again.

N
OTHING
Sir Claude had said carried any weight, but still she found herself thinking about it that evening at the Royal Albert Hall, where there was a special promenade concert in her honour. In the past music had never been much of a solace and had always been tinged with obligation, the repertoire familiar largely from concerts like this she had had to attend. Tonight, though, the music seemed more relevant.

This was a voice, she thought, as a boy played the clarinet: Mozart, a voice everybody in the hall knew and recognised though Mozart had been dead two hundred years. And she remembered Helen Schlegel in
Howards End
putting pictures to Beethoven at the concert in the Queen’s Hall that Forster describes, Beethoven’s another voice that everyone knew.

The boy finished, the audience applauded and, clapping too, she leaned over towards another of the party as if sharing her appreciation. But what she wanted to say was that, old as she was, renowned as she was, no one knew her voice. And in the car taking them back she suddenly said: ‘I have no voice.’

‘Not surprised,’ said the duke. ‘Too damned hot. Throat, is it?’

It was a sultry night and unusually for her she woke in the early hours unable to sleep.

The policeman in the garden, seeing the light go on, turned on his mobile as a precaution.

She had been reading about the Brontës and what a hard time they had had of it when they were children, but she didn’t feel that would send her off to sleep again and, looking for something else, saw in the corner of the bookshelf the book by Ivy Compton-Burnett which she had borrowed from the travelling library and which Mr Hutchings had given her all that time ago. It had been hard going and had nearly sent her to sleep then, she remembered, so perhaps it would do the trick again.

Far from it, and the novel she had once found slow now seemed refreshingly brisk, dry still but astringently so, with Dame Ivy’s no-nonsense tone reassuringly close to her own. And it occurred to her (as next day she wrote down) that reading was, among other things, a muscle and one that she had seemingly developed. She could read the novel with ease and great pleasure, laughing at remarks (they were hardly jokes) that she had not even noticed before. And through it all she could hear the voice of Ivy Compton-Burnett, unsentimental, severe and wise. She could hear her voice as clearly as earlier in the evening she had heard the voice of Mozart. She closed the book. And once again she said out loud: ‘I have no voice.’

And somewhere in West London where these things are recorded a transcribing and expressionless typist thought it was an odd remark and said as if in reply: ‘Well, if you don’t, dear, I don’t know who does.’

Back in Buckingham Palace the Queen waited a moment or two, then switched off the light, and under the catalpa tree in the grounds the policeman saw the light go out and turned off his mobile.

In the darkness it came to the Queen that, dead, she would exist only in the memories of people. She who had never been subject to anyone would now be on a par with everybody else. Reading could not change that – though writing might.

Had she been asked if reading had enriched her life she would have had to say yes, undoubtedly, though adding with equal certainty that it had at the same time drained her life of all purpose. Once she had been a self-assured single-minded woman knowing where her duty lay and intent on doing it for as long as she was able. Now all too often she was in two minds. Reading was not doing, that had always been the trouble. And old though she was she was still a doer.

She switched the light on again and reached for her notebook and wrote: ‘You don’t put your life into your books. You find it there.’

Then she went to sleep.

I
N THE WEEKS that followed it was noticeable that the Queen was reading less, if at all. She was pensive and abstracted even, but not because her mind was on what she was reading. She no longer carried a book with her wherever she went and the piles of volumes that had accumulated on her desk were shelved, sent back to the libraries or otherwise dispersed.

But, reading or not, she still spent long hours at her desk, sometimes looking at her notebooks and occasionally writing in them, though she knew, without quite spelling it out to herself, that her writing would be even less popular than her reading, and did anyone knock at the door she immediately swept them into her desk drawer before saying, ‘Come in.’

She found, though, that when she had written something down, even if it was just an entry in her notebook, she was happy as once she would have been happy after doing some reading. And it came to her again that she did not want simply to be a reader. A reader was next door to being a spectator whereas when she was writing she was doing, and doing was her duty.

Meanwhile she was often in the library, particularly at Windsor, looking through her old desk diaries, the albums of her innumerable visits, her archive in fact.

‘Is there anything specific that Your Majesty is looking for?’ said the librarian after he had brought her yet another pile of material.

‘No,’ said the Queen. ‘One is just trying to remember what it was like. Though what “it” is one isn’t sure either.’

‘Well, if Your Majesty does remember, then I hope you will tell me. Or better still, ma’am, write it down. Your Majesty is a living archive.’

Though she felt he could have expressed this more tactfully, she knew what he meant and reflected, too, that here was someone else who was urging her to write. It was almost becoming a duty, and she had always been very good at duty, until, that is, she started to read. Still, to be urged to write and to be urged to publish are two different things and nobody so far was urging her to do the latter.

Seeing the books disappear from her desk and having once more something approaching Her Majesty’s whole attention were welcome to Sir Kevin and indeed to the household in general. Timekeeping did not improve, it’s true, and the Queen’s wardrobe still tended to be a little wayward (‘I’d outlaw that cardigan,’ said her maid). But Sir Kevin shared in the general impression that for all these persistent shortcomings Her Majesty had seen off her infatuation with books and had returned to normal.

She stayed that autumn for a few days at Sandring-ham, as she was scheduled to make a royal visit to the city of Norwich. There was a service in the cathedral, a walkabout in the pedestrian precinct and before she had luncheon at the university she opened a new fire station.

Seated between the vice-chancellor and the professor of creative writing she was mildly surprised when over her shoulder came a bony wrist and red hand that were very familiar, proffering a prawn cocktail.

‘Hello, Norman,’ she said.

‘Your Majesty,’ said Norman correctly, and smoothly presented the lord lieutenant with his prawn cocktail, before going on down the table.

‘Your Majesty knows Seakins then, ma’am?’ said the professor of creative writing.

‘One did,’ said the Queen, saddened a little that Norman seemed to have made no progress in the world at all and was seemingly back in a kitchen, even if it was not hers.

‘We thought’, said the vice-chancellor, ‘that it would be rather a treat for the students if they were to serve the meal. They will be paid, of course, and it’s all experience.’

‘Seakins’, said the professor, ‘is very promising. He has just graduated and is one of our success stories.’

The Queen was a little put out that, despite her bright smile, serving the boeuf en croûte Norman seemed determined not to catch her eye, and the same went for the poire belle-Hélène. And it came to her that for some reason Norman was sulking, behaviour she had seldom come across except in children and the occasional cabinet minister. Subjects seldom sulked to the Queen as they were not entitled to, and once upon a time it would have taken them to the Tower.

A few years ago she would never have noticed what Norman was doing or anybody else either, and if she took note of it now it was because she knew more of people’s feelings than she used to and could put herself in someone else’s place. Though it still didn’t explain why he was so put out.

‘Books are wonderful, aren’t they?’ she said to the vice-chancellor, who concurred.

‘At the risk of sounding like a piece of steak,’ she said, ‘they tenderise one.’

He concurred again, though with no notion of what she was on about.

‘I wonder’, she turned to her other neighbour, ‘whether as professor of creative writing you would agree that if reading softens one up, writing does the reverse. To write you have to be tough, do you not?’ Surprised to find himself discussing his own subject, the professor was momentarily at a loss. The Queen waited. ‘Tell me,’ she wanted to say, ‘tell me I am right.’ But the lord lieutenant was rising to wait upon her and the room shuffled to its feet. No one was going to tell her, she thought. Writing, like reading, was something she was going to have to do on her own.

Though not quite, and afterwards Norman is sent for, and the Queen, her lateness now proverbial but catered for in the schedule, spends half an hour being updated on his university career, including the circumstances that brought him to East Anglia in the first place. It is arranged that he will come to Sandring-ham the following day, where the Queen feels that now he has begun to write he may be in a position to assist her once again.

Between one day and the next, though, she sacked somebody else, and Sir Kevin came into his office in the morning to find his desk cleared. Though Norman’s stint at the university had been advantageous Her Majesty did not like being deceived, and though the real culprit was the prime minister’s special adviser Sir Kevin carried the can. Once it would have brought him to the block; these days it brought him a ticket back to New Zealand and an appointment as high commissioner. It was the block but it took longer.

S
LIGHTLY TO
her own surprise that year the Queen turned eighty. It was not a birthday that went unmarked and various celebrations were organised, some more to Her Majesty’s liking than others, with her advisers tending to regard the birthday as just another opportunity to ingratiate the monarchy with the always fickle public.

It was not surprising, then, that the Queen decided to throw a party of her own and to assemble all those who had had the privilege of advising her over the years. This was in effect a party for the Privy Council, appointment to which is for life, thus making it a large and unwieldy body that in its entirety meets seldom and then only on occasions of some gravity. But there was nothing, thought the Queen, that would preclude her having them all to tea, and a serious tea at that, ham, tongue, mustard and cress, scones, cakes and even trifle. Much preferable to dinner, she thought, and cosier altogether.